More Than a Pile of Iron Scraps: Understanding the Archaeology of Blacksmith Shops

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the archaeology of blacksmithing through examining the Tom Cook Blacksmith Shop in Texas with excavations yielding more than 25,000 artifacts. This research is part of the Bolivar Archaeological Project, a collaborative, multidisciplinary project that attends to marginalized histories to offer a model for how publicly funded cultural resource management can incorporate descendant communities and local stakeholders into the fabric of the research design and planning for a state infrastructure project. Located along the Chisholm Trail and belonging to Tom Cook, an African American freedman, the archaeological assemblage of the blacksmith shop offers insight into life and blacksmithing along the Texas frontier. Once ubiquitous, blacksmiths and their associated archaeological assemblages embody the historical processes of craft and industry. Bridging the craft and archaeology of blacksmithing, this study involves collaboration with professional blacksmiths and stakeholder communities. Building on foundational research and the Tom Cook archaeological assemblage, this research addresses how to archaeologically identify blacksmithing, types of archaeological evidence, layout of a blacksmith shop and the different methods and approaches. An archaeology of blacksmithing offers multiple scales of resolution, from identifying the individual signature of a blacksmith to the range of materials and spheres of activities of broader regional contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52458